I understand you may be surprised at the seemingly harsh responsa you are receiving from jews on tumblr. If you’re wondering why we’re bitter, I’ll give you a thorough explanation. First of all, I ask you whether you know what happened in Har Nof a few weeks ago, or here in Crown Heights last week.

In both cases, there were protests and riots about the fact that the attacker/terrorist was killed, and no protests anywhere about the fact that they came into a jewish place of worship armed, and tried to kill, or successful killed, innocent jews.

Har Nof (where the perpetrators were two Arab terrorists who came into an orthodox synagogue wielding guns and hatches in a neighborhood of Jerusalem during morning prayers, who shot and killed 5 worshippers, and were hacking at people with their axes, trying to kill or injure or kill as many as they could) was played off as a “natural consequence of Israeli policies” and “couldn’t possibly be an antisemitic hate crime”. Many Arab Muslim organizations celebrated the terrorist perpetrators as heroes and martyrs, and hundreds of Arabs took to the streets, rioting partly in their support, and party because they were killed by police trying to stop them. Most international news outlets reported it first -incorrectly- as being a jewish attack on a Muslim place of worship, and a few of the news outlets even refused to correct it after the real new was out.

The stabbing in Crown Heights was played off as “the attacker was mentally ill, and obviously was not aware of what he was doing”, instead of saying “he had all of New York city that he could have done this, and he came all the way to Crown Heights to try and attack at the huge synagogue which is effectively in a lot of ways the capital of judaism in the diaspora. This is obviously an antisemite crime.” he didn’t live in Crown Heights you know. He had to come all the way across the city to come and stab a rabbinical student, a KID, who was sitting and reading.

The same people who are suddenly making chanukah posts are the same people who have ignored us all year. Some of them even went out to violently protest against Israel -in front of private jewish businesses that have nothing to do with Israel- as the country tried to protect itself against Arab terrorist attacks, or are members of BDS, or SFP, both groups who spend a lot of time actively, hostilely, and sometimes violently opposing or disrupting jewish groups on college campuses. If they aren’t actually part of these groups, more often then not, they sit at home, ignoring them, instead of standing up for the jews when they need help. Many of these people will shrug this post off, or excuse themselves by saying “Oh, I have friends who are jewish!”

These same people post about injustice in Ferguson, they post about injustice with the Arabs, they post about injustice with women, they post about injustice with LGBTQA (there’s more letters I’m sure but I’ve lost track) people, but they erase us, because “antisemitism doesn’t exist anymore”.